If you ran a ski resort that caters to the sort of wealth that populates Aspen, maybe you wouldn’t view rising energy costs as the threat that many price-sensitive businesses and manufacturers do. Maybe you too would scoff at the idea that a national cap and trade policy would harm the economy, and thus resent the U.S. Chamber of Commerce for saying so.

“Aspen is becoming the iconic place to make a stand on the U.S. Chamber,” the vice president of sustainability at the Aspen Skiing Co. told The Denver Post this week. Auden Schendler is pushing Aspen’s chamber “to divorce the national chamber” over the latter’s campaign two years ago to defeat national climate legislation and its continued opposition to the idea.

A local activist from a climate-change group added that “it makes absolutely no sense for the city’s businesses to be paying dues to a group that is completely opposite of everything Aspen stands for.”

No, that wouldn’t make sense. But does Aspen stand for policies that don’t work? Does it favor bureaucracies making decisions that climate-law advocates promised would be left to markets?

The European Union’s emissions trading system has been in place since 2005, and it’s a mess. Last month the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel reported the EU had thought emissions trading “would limit the release of harmful greenhouse gases. But it isn’t working. The price for emissions certificates has plunged, a development that is actually making coal more attractive than renewable energy.”

The report identified “the system’s central design flaw: politicians determine the total amount of CO2 that industry in the EU may emit, a limit that applies years into the future, without any way to know how the economy — and thus the demand for trading certificates — will develop during that period.”

Bureaucrats could of course step in and arbitrarily reduce the number of emissions certificates to boost their price. But if they did, says Der Spiegel, “the EU would run the risk of its timing being perpetually out of step. And the market forces that were originally meant to establish appropriate prices would be on the outside looking in.”

Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger of the Breakthrough Institute recently wrote that cap and trade “has had no discernible impact on European emissions,” despite their cost. Indeed, “the carbon intensity of the European economy has not declined at all since the imposition of the [trading system]. Meanwhile green paragon Germany has embarked upon a coal-building binge … .”

Ironically, U.S. carbon emissions started declining in 2005, and federal officials predict the trend will persist for several years — in part because of a revolution in natural gas production. But as Nordhaus and Shellenberger point out, if cap and trade had been in place, it might have impeded the switch from coal to gas given “the massive handout of free emissions allocations to the coal industry” embedded in the failed bill.

Do cap-and-trade fans believe our central planners will be smarter than Europe’s and avoid unintended consequences from a program full of “carve-outs, concessions and out-and-out gifts”? That’s how The New York Times described the last major climate bill, and the next one will be similar.

Roger Pielke Jr., an environmental sciences professor at CU-Boulder, has argued that “instead of making fossil fuels more expensive, we should be taking steps to make the alternatives cheaper” by investing much more on research and innovation. “You achieve the same result,” he once told NPR, “become more competitive, but you don’t run up against the effects of people paying more for their energy.”

As wonderful as skiing at Aspen is, it’s recreation. It doesn’t feed, clothe, shelter, transport, educate, keep us warm, heal our diseases, foster communication or save us labor. Surely the national chamber can be forgiven for emphasizing the economic interests of businesses that do.